AX7 T&A: Indirect activities

Indirect Activities is used for all other job types that does not involve absence, manufacturing execution, projects or project activities.

You can set up all you need for general tracking by just creating indirect activities. It is possible to set up costs for the different indirect activities. You can even set your own GL posting and financial dimensions, so you can get a lot of good financial data out of this. For instance this can be used to run costing for departments where you have people moving between departments and doing different work. It works very well, but I would recommend using the projects accounting module for proper internal cost tracking, as it is a lot more configurable and able to handle more aspects then just the employee hours.

First you need to create the categories. You can access these in Time and attendance > Setup > Indirect activity categories.

There are four types of indirect activities:

Job (General jobs and system tasks)

Break

Switch code

On Call

You can only have one type of activity within each category and each type activate/deactivate different parameters in the setup. You can also allow registration on the category by activating the registration for Time and attendance.

In AX7 you can also maintain all activities in a flat structure in the Indirect activities form (Time and attendance > Maintain indirect activities > Indirect Activities)

Job Activities:There are some job activities created by the configuration wizard. These are the system specific jobs that are connected to a system function other then the type “Jobs”.

The system jobs are:

Clock in

Clock out

Start assistance

Stop assistance

Change pilot

Submit registrations

Clear

System waiting

Stop break

Info

Switch bundle mode

If you are missing any of the system tasks, you might want to create these in the indirect activities Group called “System” (Created by the wizard) later on.

Other then the system jobs, you can create a job of type: job… Which is simply just a way to handle your internal costing. These are the jobs that will contain miscellaneous type of work like machine, equipment or building repairs, meetings or other type of work performed that need tracking.

Break activities:You can either create default breaks in the profiles, but you can also set it up, so the users them selves can select when they take a break and how long it should be.

You can create different types of break activities that will holt the cost allocation to the operation beeing executed on.

You can choose if the break is a paid break and to set a timer for the activity. If the user does not punch a cancel break activity within a given time frame (with tolerance settings) the break will turn in to an unpaid break activity.

You can activate the “Cancel break” to create activities that cancel an active break. This can be different types of cancelation reasons like if there is a machine issue, you would like to track that as opposed to user related cancelations (like if they just wanted to go back to work).

Switch code activities:Switch codes are used to toggle different types of pay agreements and profile types in the profile.

I use these to mostly toggle overtime and toggle flex vs. overtime for flexi time users.

If you have a special type of pay account build up as well you can use this parameter to toggle this on or off.

You can demand an approval of a switch code. Like in most cases you would not approve overtime automatically, but you need an extra action to do so.

A switch code can also cancel or exclude another switch code, so for the overtime scenario you will also want a cancel overtime activity that negate the overtime switch codes.

On Call:The on Call activity is a special activity that is called once for each shift (the time between clock in and clock out).

If the user triggers this at any time durring a shift, the entire work time will be “marked” with this On Call activity.

So you can use this as a to trigger where the user gets a special added pay type to each working hour.

I use this for triggering self-managed bonuses. For example if a worker needs to go to jobb in the middle of the night because a machine has stopped or something.

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3 thoughts on “AX7 T&A: Indirect activities”

Hi Fredrik,
First off an awesome blog series. This is simply the best I have seen yet in a given area.

My question is how I handle breaks without stopping production. Many process operations, do not require a person to be watching over them all the time, especially those operations which have a culture added to them in a vessel or are continuous e.g. bread ovens, plastic extrusion. But the costs of the operation are still incurred over the entire duration the work centre is running.

I want the employees to clock on and associate themselves with particular operations so we have visibility of who was responsible for an operation or series of operations at a given time. Alongside this operators also have to do many warehouse or non-direct production operation activities such as cleaning and prepping.

Can the time and attendance component work with Production to handle this situation.

My thought is an operator clocks onto multiple operations at once, take a break, undertake a multitude of other tasks all without stopping the production operation and therefore the collection of workcentre (non-labour) costs against that operation. How is this achieved?

Hi Stephen,
I currently have no good solution for these scenarios. I have a lot of customers within metal fabrication and I do run in to the same issues in some areas. I am working on a case study into this and hope to post it soon.